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Re: Major problems with the Gigabyte GA-X79S-UP5-WIFI board

Originally Posted by Acebmxer

What are you using for a cpu cooler? Have you check the mount on it? Reaply thermal paste? Do you have a fan blowing vrms?

Dedicated HW Labs BI GTX480 for the CPU with an EK Supreme HF block. Thermal interface is Indigo Xtreme, and the temperatures are under control, at least on the CPU. The VRM I did not measure but I "felt" the heatsink by hand and it is basically cold (lukewarm). I have a 120mm fan blowing over the VRM too. Also, the VRM on this board is rated for 135C, and there is no way that I am running even close to that. I will however try to get an actual measurement of the VRM temperatures just to completely eliminate that as the issue that is triggering a TDP limiter.

Re: Major problems with the Gigabyte GA-X79S-UP5-WIFI board

Originally Posted by dejanh

Dedicated HW Labs BI GTX480 for the CPU with an EK Supreme HF block. Thermal interface is Indigo Xtreme, and the temperatures are under control, at least on the CPU. The VRM I did not measure but I "felt" the heatsink by hand and it is basically cold (lukewarm). I have a 120mm fan blowing over the VRM too. Also, the VRM on this board is rated for 135C, and there is no way that I am running even close to that. I will however try to get an actual measurement of the VRM temperatures just to completely eliminate that as the issue that is triggering a TDP limiter.

I just finished running tests on the VRM temperatures. I hooked up my DT301 with a K-type probe to the base of the VRM heatsink. I realize that this is not right on the VRM, but in order to get in there I would have to remove the whole board and remove the heatsink, which I have no plans of doing. I made sure to put the probe in an area with obstructed airflow (behind the 8-pin CPU connector) and then I ran a 10 minute Prime95 Blend test with the chip at default with Turbo enabled. Peak VRM temperatures measured at heatsink base were at 30.5C. Let's say that by some odd chance the VRM is 15C hotter than the heatsink, that would put it at 45.5C. Next, without moving the probe or anything, I ran a 10 minute test at 4.4GHz (of course, it's not really 4.4GHz since the board is immediately throttling when I load it with Prime95 Blend). After 10 minutes, the peak VRM temperatures measured at the base of the heatsink were 33.3C. Again, let's say that the actual temperatures of the VRM if I could put the probe directly on one of them are 15C more, that puts the VRM temperature at 48.3C measured on the VRM. Heck, if they were 30C more measured directly at the VRM itself, that still puts the VRM no higher than 63.3C. That's nothing for this type of high-end VRM

The other guy (Blameless on OCN) who is reporting the same type of problem as me and is already talking to Gigabyte is now getting the "it's the CPU" runaround What's the chance of having two defective CPUs both exhibiting identical symptoms and both on this board (hint, the answer is "no chance" )? I'm not buying that even for a second. This is not to even mention that both his CPU and my CPU are randomly sampled and they both check out just fine when overclocking on competitors boards (in my case RIVE).

Stock clock VRM temps...

4.4GHz overclock VRM temps (throttling was active during this time)...

Re: Major problems with the Gigabyte GA-X79S-UP5-WIFI board

I decided to run one more test, this time with an old tool called Arena (chess simulation), using a Toga II engine capable of loading 8 threads at the same time. I used this program before to diagnose the OCP/TDP limitation problem on the Asus R2E board I mentioned earlier. Basically, if OCP/TDP limit is what is causing the throttling, then this tool will not cause throttling to occur. It loads the CPU at 100% workload, but the workload is not power-intensive and does not draw a large amount of current like the workload that is simulated with LinX for example. After running the tool for 12 minutes and counting at 4.6GHz, well, see for yourself...no throttling occurs.

I'm 100% certain that this is OCP/TDP throttling that's going on. As for the other issue that results in CPU multiplier simply having no effect when Turbo is disabled, well, I'm not sure certain why that is... Anyway, the main thing is to get the throttling to stop, after that we can look at other issues (i.e., not being able to apply multipliers without Turbo being enabled).

Re: Major problems with the Gigabyte GA-X79S-UP5-WIFI board

Sorry I can't help with that board but,
Didn't the UP5 user thread get deleted on OCN? I was checking it out and one day it was gone. I was going to buy this board but decided against it.
Supposedly at one point Gigabyte put some LLC limitations in the bios after some jokers managed to burn up a board, don't know what has changed since then, I lost my link to the article.

Re: Major problems with the Gigabyte GA-X79S-UP5-WIFI board

Originally Posted by boondocks

Sorry I can't help with that board but,
Didn't the UP5 user thread get deleted on OCN? I was checking it out and one day it was gone. I was going to buy this board but decided against it.
Supposedly at one point Gigabyte put some LLC limitations in the bios after some jokers managed to burn up a board, don't know what has changed since then, I lost my link to the article.

Yeah, sometihng like that did happen with the Gigabyte boards that came out initially for the X79/LGA2011 platform. I am not sure that the same should apply to this board though as the VRM was completely redesigned. This VRM is capable of handling 480A and running at 135C. That's a lot of current and temperature. I'm doing some more testing and will post an update a bit later today with some further results.

Re: Major problems with the Gigabyte GA-X79S-UP5-WIFI board

I have ran a few more tests and have a few more observations to share.

First, the throttling definitely kicks in when the chip is using the AVX instructions. That's consistent with a much larger current/power draw since AVX tends to push the processor that much more when compared to the same stress test without AVX. I tested with both Prime95 26.6 (no AVX) and Prime95 27.7 (AVX), and LinX 0.6.4 with old libraries that do not support AVX, then with new libraries that use AVX and every time AVX is used the clock will throttle.

I have also spent a substantial amount of time trying to figure out whether the turbo watt/amp limits have any effect, and I am quite certain that these features are not working at all right now.

Next I was measuring temperatures on the back of the board in the VRM area. While they are higher than the ones I measured earlier, I was measuring between 5C-10C higher on the back of the board when compared to the heatsink base on the front of the board, which is nothing substantial and still way below any limits of the VRMs used on this board.

Next is a test of overclocking with Turbo disabled using UEFI BIOS F3...as you can see, the overclock works just fine to set the correct speed. It still throttles however so nothing is fixed there.

Finally, I also observed that dropping the memory frequency to 1066MHz will allow the multiplier to stay more steady than when the memory is running at 1866MHz and the chip is stressed with AVX load, which again seems to be consistent with the fact that lower memory speed is generally less demanding on the CPU. Higher memory frequencies will exacerbate the throttling problem.

Overall, the UEFI BIOS is really buggy on this board and needs a lot of work still. I am not sure when Gigabyte is planning to address any of these issues, but I have a feeling that it will be a while.

Re: Major problems with the Gigabyte GA-X79S-UP5-WIFI board

I'm guessing you are not going to get much help here. Probably your best bet is to stick with the thread at OCN. But it's entirely possible you just have a bad board. I would push Gigabyte for a replacement or try to RMA to whomever you bought it from. I know this is the "official" Gigabyte site but don't expect someone from the company to reply here, it most likely ain't going to happen.
About the problems with adding the increased RAM, have you run any comprehensive memory tests? Also it could be the particular RAM you have is not 100% compatible with the board, and although with half the slots filled it works it just may not with all slots filled. Could be incompatibilities or just bad ram, it happens. I know someone with another brand X79 board that has had to RMA a bunch of Corsair memory lately, so I'm just saying it's a possibility to consider as bad batches do slip by sometimes.
Good luck and hope you get it straightened out.

Re: Major problems with the Gigabyte GA-X79S-UP5-WIFI board

Originally Posted by boondocks

I'm guessing you are not going to get much help here. Probably your best bet is to stick with the thread at OCN. But it's entirely possible you just have a bad board. I would push Gigabyte for a replacement or try to RMA to whomever you bought it from. I know this is the "official" Gigabyte site but don't expect someone from the company to reply here, it most likely ain't going to happen.
About the problems with adding the increased RAM, have you run any comprehensive memory tests? Also it could be the particular RAM you have is not 100% compatible with the board, and although with half the slots filled it works it just may not with all slots filled. Could be incompatibilities or just bad ram, it happens. I know someone with another brand X79 board that has had to RMA a bunch of Corsair memory lately, so I'm just saying it's a possibility to consider as bad batches do slip by sometimes.
Good luck and hope you get it straightened out.

I trust that what you say is true, however this thread is getting some attention, and I want to keep it that way until the issues are resolved, especially because this is the official support forum.

I doubt that the board is defective because there are plenty of scenarios in which it runs just fine, and a defective board is not consistent with issues such as throttling when using AVX instruction set but not when not using an AVX instruction set. I am questioning memory compatibility as being one part of the problem, so I am planning to pick up some qualified quad channel gear this morning and do a validation run to verify if a memory issue is possibly exacerbating or even causing one or more of these issues.

Re: Major problems with the Gigabyte GA-X79S-UP5-WIFI board

Finished testing with two brand new sets of Corsair Dominator Platinum quad-channel sticks. No effect on throttling problem at all. The board was still unable to run 8-banks of 2133MHz memory, though the test was performed with 1866MHz memory in this case which makes this a questionable result as I had to OC the memory to try to push 2133MHz. Is there any known way to reliably test the strength of the IMC on these boards? In the X58 world I could push the Uncore to gauge just how strong the IMC is on the chips. Here it seems that I have no such ability.

Edit: I found one more important bug that should be easy to fix.

The highest tRC value in the UEFI BIOS that can be manually set for memory is 32, however most of the time higher values than this are needed (all of the recent memory that I used that exceeds 1600MHz runs best with tRC 33 and higher, with my 2133MHz kit requiring tRC 38). We should have the flexibility to set this much higher manually, as high as 75-80 or more. Current limit of 32 is a major problem for running 8 banks of high-speed memory.